Back before cell phones … before video games … before television … even before electric radios, there were crystal radio receivers.

In the early 1920s and 1930s, magazines offered instructions on how to build the sets and young people responded to the challenge and heard words moving through the air.

Dennis Kunkle describes himself as “a collector of vintage electronics.” The Director of Facilities for the York County History Center, he says a crystal set he purchased on e-Bay is “the oldest thing I own.” And it still works!

An early crystal set was not difficult to make in a home environment. According to Dennis, the components you needed were easy-to-obtain:

No wall outlet was needed for electricity; the crystal set was “powered by the miniscule energy in the radio wave.”

Dennis imagines a family in the 1920s wondering, “Where’s Junior?” would get the response, “He’s playing with the radio.” He moves that forward by saying a family today asking, “Where’s Junior?” would get the response, “He’s playing video games.”

The popularity of crystal sets declined when electric-powered radios became affordable. However, for certain segments of the population – most notably Boy Scouts – building a crystal radio set became a goal to be achieved.

During World War II, Dennis says, as American soldiers were fighting their way across Europe they found out they could adapt their crystal set knowledge to create rudimentary sets that could not be detected by the enemy. They were called “foxhole radios.”

Working with materials at hand, the GIs would use a toilet paper tube, wire, a Gillette Blue razor blade (the coating had properties similar to a crystal), and a graphite pencil. Add an earphone, a steady hand, a little luck and they could hear music or news.

Dennis, 65, is a graduate of Dallastown Area High School and Millersville University with a degree in Industrial Arts education. As a collector, he has more than 100 radios and interacts – via an online forum – with other collectors around the world. He has constructed his own “foxhole radio.”

In the 1950s there was a resurgence of interest in crystal radio sets, thanks mainly to what where then called “boys’ magazines.”

A few weeks ago, Dennis purchased another crystal radio set on eBay. Once he added the missing crystal, he says, “I hooked up an antenna and ground wire” a set of headphones “and quickly found a Baltimore Orioles baseball game.” (Given the Orioles season, Dennis may have been one of the few people listening to the game.)

Dennis enjoys sharing the crystal radio receiver with young people today. When the York County History Center holds Family Days at the Agricultural and Industrial Museum, he will bring in a crystal radio receiver.

When a young person hears the transmission through the headphones, Dennis says the child’s eyes light up and you can almost hear them thinking, “What’s going on here.”

The light in the young person’s eyes is probably only exceed by the light in Dennis’ eyes.

Gordon Freireich is a former editor of the York Sunday News. E-mail:gordon@newtongroup.com.